To the east the fog is heavy and white and hangs in long strips on the hills bordering Albert’s ranch. When the early sun climbs above the crest, it seems to burst among the trees like a shattered red diamond. From the kitchen window, where he is drinking coffee and looking down the long slope of his southern pasture, he sees a rust-eaten car coming up the road, its headlights glowing against the shadows that cover the valley floor. One headlight is out of alignment and glitters oddly, like the eye of a man who has been injured in a fight. The passenger window is encased with cardboard and silver duct tape.
The girl from the saloon knocks at his front door, dressed in colorless jeans and a navy-blue corduroy coat. She wears a cute cap and her cheeks are red in the wind. She is obviously awed by the size of his home, the massive amounts of quarried stone that support the two top floors, the huge logs that could probably absorb a cannon shell. Through the rear window of her vehicle, he can see a small boy strapped in a child’s car seat.
“I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about what happened to your horse,” she says.
“It’s not your fault,” Albert says.
Her eyes leave his, then come back again. He thinks he can smell an odor in her clothes and hair like damp leaves burning in the fall. He hears his wife call to him from the bedroom. “Come in,” he tells the girl. “I have to see to Mrs. Hollister. She’s been ill for some time now.”
Then he wonders to himself why he has just told the girl his personal business.
“We’re on our way to Idaho. I just wanted to thank you and to apologize.”
“That’s good of you. But it’s not necessary.”
She looks down the pasture at the frost on the barn roof and the wind blowing in the bunchgrass. She sucks in her cheeks, as though her mouth has gone dry. “They got your name from me, not from the undersheriff.”
In the silence he can hear his wife getting up from the bed and walking toward the bathroom on her own. He feels torn between listening to the young woman and tending to his wife. “Run that by me again?” he says.
“One of them was my ex-husband’s cellmate in Deer Lodge. They wanted to know your name and if it was you who called the cops. They’re in the A.B. That’s why I’m going to Idaho. I’m not pressing charges,” she says.
“The Aryan Brotherhood?”
She sticks her hands in the pockets of her jacket and balls them into fists, all the time looking at the ground. Then Albert realizes she has not come to his home simply to apologize. He also realizes the smoke he smells on her clothes and person did not come from a pile of burning leaves.
“My boss is gonna send me a check in two weeks. At least that’s what he says. My boyfriend is trying to get one of those FEMA construction jobs in New Orleans. But his P.O. won’t give him permission to leave the state. I have enough money for gas to Idaho, Mr. Hollister, but I don’t have enough for a motel.”
“I see,” he replies, and wonders how a man of his age could be so dumb. “Will fifty dollars help? Because that’s all I have on me.”
She seems to think about it. “That’d be all right,” she says. She glances over her shoulder at the little boy strapped in the car seat. Her nails look bitten, the self-concern and design in her eyes undisguised. “The saloon will be open at ten.”
“I don’t follow you,” he said.
“I could take a check. They’ll cash it for me at the saloon.”
He lets her words slide off his face without reacting to them. When he removes the bills from his wallet and places them in her hand, she cups his fingers in her palm. “You’re a good man,” she says.
“When are they coming?” he asks.
“Sir?”
He shakes his head to indicate he has disengaged from the conversation and closes the door, then walks down the hallway and helps his wife back to her bed. “Was that someone from the church?” she asks.
During the night he hears hail on the roof, then high winds that make a rushing sound, like water, through the trees on the hillsides. He dreams about a place in South Texas where he and his father bobber-fished in a chain of ponds that had been formed by sheets of twisted steel spinning out of the sky like helicopter blades when Texas City exploded in February of 1947. In the dream, wind is blowing through a piney woods that borders a saltwater bay hammered with light. His father speaks to him inside the wind, but Albert cannot make out the words or decipher the meaning they contain.
In the distance he hears motorized vehicles grinding up a grade, throttling back, then accelerating again, working their way higher and higher up the mountainside, with the relentlessness of chain saws.
He wakes and sits up in bed, not because of the engines but because they have stopped—somewhere above his house, inside the trees, perhaps on the ridgeline where an old log road traverses the length of the canyon.
He removes the rifle from his closet and loads it. He disarms the security system and steps out onto the gallery, in the moonlight and the sparkle of frost on the bunchgrass. His hands and uncovered head and bare feet are cold. He levers a shell into the chamber but releases the hammer with his thumb so that it cannot drop by accident and strike the shell casing, discharging the round. The fir trees are black-green against the hillside, the arroyo behind his house empty. The air is clean and smells of pine and snow melting on the rocks and woodsmoke from a neighbor’s chimney down the canyon. In the whisper of the wind through the trees he wants to believe the engine sounds in his dream are just that—the stuff of dreams. Far up the hill he hears a glass bottle break on stone and a motorcycle roar to life.
Inside the topmost trees three separate fires burst alight and fill the woods with shadows. The sound of motorcycle engines multiplies and three balls of flame move in different directions down the ridgeline. Inside the house, he calls 911 and through the back window he sees the silhouette of one rider towing a fireball that caroms off the undergrowth, the points of ignition fanning down the slope in the wind.
“What’s the nature of your emergency?” the dispatcher asks.
“This is Albert Hollister, up Sleeman Gulch. At least three men on motorcycles are stringing fires down my ridgeline.”
“Which way are they headed?”
“Who cares where they’re headed? The wind is out of the southwest. I’ll have sparks on my roof in a half hour. Get the goddamn pump trucks up here.”
“Would you not swear, please?”
“These men are criminals. They’re burning my land.”
“Repeat, please. I cannot understand what you’re saying.”
His voice has wakened and frightened his wife. He comforts her in her bed, then goes outside again and watches a red glow spread across the top of the valley. The summer has been dry and the fire ripples through the soft patina of grass at the base of the trees and superheats the air trapped under the canopy. A sudden rush of cold wind through the timber hits the fire like an influx of pure oxygen. Flame balloons out of the canopy and in seconds turns fir trees into black scorches dripping with sparks. He can hear deer running across rocks and see hundreds of bats flying in and out of a sulfurous yellow cloud that has formed above the flames. He connects a hose to the faucet on the back of the house and sprays the bib of green grass on the slope, his heart racing, his mouth dry with fear.
By noon the next day the wind has died and inside the smell of ash is another odor, one that reminds him of the small room on the third floor of the parish prison where a man was strapped down in a wood chair and cooked to death with thousands of volts of electricity. Joe Bim Higgins stands next to Albert in the south pasture and stares up the hillside at the burned rocks and great stands of fir that are now rust-colored, as though stricken by blight.
Joe Bim blows his nose into a handkerchief and spits into the grass. “We found a sow and her cub inside a deadfall. The fire was probably crowning when they tried to outrun it,” he says.
“Where are they, Joe Bim?” Albert asks.
“Just up there where you see that
outcropping.” He tries to pretend his misunderstanding of Albert’s question is sincere, then gives it up. “I had all three of them in a holding cell at seven this morning. But they got an alibi. Two people at their campground say they was at the campground all night.”
“You cut them loose?”
Joe Bim is not a weak man or one who has avoided paying dues. He was at Heartbreak Ridge and one side of his face is still marbled from the heat flash of a phosphorous shell that exploded ten feet from his foxhole. “I can’t chain-drag these guys down the Blackfoot highway because you don’t like them. Look, I’ve got two deputies assigned to watch them. One of them throws a cigarette butt on the sidewalk—”
“Go back to town,” Albert says.
“Maybe you don’t know who your real friends are.”
“Yeah, my wife and my yellow Lab, Buddy. I’d include my sorrel, except the two of us buried her.”
“You’re like me, Albert. You’re an old man and you can’t accept the fact you can’t have your way with everything. Grow up and stop making life hard for yourself and others.”
Albert walks away without replying. Later, he spreads lime on the carcasses of the bears that died in the fire and tries not to think the thoughts he is thinking.
That night, during a raging electric storm, Albert leaves his wife in the care of the nurse’s aide and drives in his pickup to the only twenty-four-hour public campground on the Blackfoot River in Missoula County, his lever-action rifle jittering in the rack behind his head. It’s not hard to find the three bikers. Their sky-blue polyethylene tent is huge, brightly lit from the inside, the extension flaps propped up on poles to shelter their motorcycles. Lightning flickers on the hillside across the river, limning the trees, turning the current in the river an even deeper black. The smell of ozone in the air makes Albert think of the Gulf Coast and his youth and the way rain smelled when it blew across the wetlands in the fall. He thinks of his father, who died while returning from a duck-hunting camp in Anahuac, Texas, leaving Albert to fend for himself. He wonders if this is the way dementia and death eventually steal upon a man’s soul.
Down the road he parks his truck inside a grove of Douglas fir trees that are shaggy with moss and climbs up the hill into boulders that look like the shells of giant gray turtles. He works his way across the slope until he can look down upon the bikers’ campsite. In the background the river is like black satin, the canyon roaring with the sounds of high water and reverberated thunder. The flap of the bikers’ tent is open and Albert can see three men inside, eating from GI mess kits, a bottle of stoppered booze resting against a rolled sleeping bag. They look like workingmen on a summer vacation, enjoying a meal together, perhaps talking about the fish they caught that day. But Albert knows their present circumstances and appearance and behavior have nothing to do with who they really are.
They could as easily wear starched uniforms as they do jailhouse tats. Their identity lies in their misogyny and violence and cruelty to animals and children, not the blue teardrops at the corner of the eyes or the greasy jeans or the fog of testosterone and dried beer sweat on their bodies. These are the same men who operated Robespierre’s torture chambers. They’re the burners of the Alexandrian Library, the brownshirts who pumped chlorine gas into shower rooms. They use religions and flags that allow them to peel civilizations off the face of the earth. There is no difference, Albert tells himself, between these men and a screw in a parish prison on the Louisiana-Texas border where a guard frog-walked a kid in cuffs down to an isolation area, shoved him to his knees, and closed the door on the outside world.
The rain looks like spun glass blowing in front of the open tent flap. The biker with the red beard emerges from the opening, fills his lungs with air, and checks his motorcycle. He wipes off the frame and handlebars with a clean rag and admires the perfection of his machine. Albert levers a round into the chamber and steadies his rifle across the top of a large rock. The notch of the steel sight moves across the man’s mouth and throat, the broad expanse of his chest, the hair blossoming from his shirt, then down his stomach and scrotum and jeans that are stiff with road grime and engine grease and glandular fluids.
In his mind’s eye Albert sees all the years of his youth reduced to typewritten lines written on a sheet of low-grade paper. He sees the paper consumed by a white-hot light that burns a hole through the pulp, curling through the typed words, releasing images that he thought he had dealt with years ago but in reality has not. In the smoke and flame he sees a stretch of rain-swept black road and his father’s car embedded under the frame of a tractor-trailer rig; he sees the naked, hair-covered thighs of a former Angola gunbull looming above him; he sees the ax-bladed face of a state executioner, a toothpick in his mouth, his eyes staring whimsically at Albert, as though it is Albert who is out of sync with the world and not the man who cinches the leather straps tightly to the wrists and calves of the condemned. Albert raises the rifle sight to the red-bearded man’s chest and, just as a bolt of lightning splits a towering ponderosa pine in half, he squeezes the trigger.
The rifle barrel flares into the darkness and he already imagines the bullet on its way to the red-bearded man’s chest. The round is copper-jacketed, soft-nosed, and when it strikes the man’s sternum, it will flatten and topple slightly and core through the lungs and leave an exit wound the size of Albert’s thumb.
My God, what has he done?
Albert stands up from behind the boulder and stares down the hillside. The bearded man has taken a candy bar from his pocket and is eating it while he watches the rain blowing in the light from the tent flap.
He missed, thanks either to the Lord or to the constriction in his chest that caused his hand to jerk or maybe just to the fact he’s not cut out of the same cloth as the man he has tried to kill.
Albert grasps the rifle by the barrel and swings it against a boulder and sees the butt plate and screws burst loose from the stock. He swings the rifle again, harder, and still breaks nothing of consequence loose from either the wood or the steel frame. He flings the rifle like a pinwheel into the darkness, the sight on the barrel’s tip ripping the heel of his hand.
He cannot believe what happens next. The rifle bounces muzzle-down off the roof of a passing SUV, arcing back into the air with new life, and lands right in front of the bikers’ tent.
He drives farther down the dirt road, away from the bikers’ camp, his headlights off, rocks skidding from his tires into the canyon below.
When he gets back home, he strips off his wet clothes and sits in the bottom of the shower stall until he drains all the hot water out of the tank. His hands will not stop shaking.
The rains are heavy the following spring and in May the bunchgrass in Albert’s pastures is tall and green, as thick as Kansas wheat, and the hillsides are sprinkled with wildflowers. In the evening whitetail and mule deer drift out of the trees and graze along the edge of the irrigation canal he has dug from a spring at the base of the burned area behind his house. He would like to tell himself that the land will continue to mend, that a good man has nothing to fear from the world and that he has put aside the evil done to him by the bikers. But he has finally learned that lying to oneself is an offense for which human beings seldom grant themselves absolution.
He comes to believe that acceptance of a wintry place in the soul and a refusal to speak about it to others is as much consolation as a man gets, and for some odd reason that thought seems to bring him peace. He is thinking these thoughts as he returns home from his wife’s funeral in June. Joe Bim Higgins is sitting on the front steps of his gallery, the trousers of his dress suit stuffed inside his cowboy boots, a Stetson hat balanced on his knee, a cigarette almost burned down to a hot stub between two fingers. A pallbearer’s ribbon is still in his lapel.
“The old woman wants me to invite you to dinner tonight,” Joe Bim says.
“I appreciate it,” Albert replies.
“You never heard no more from those bikers, huh?”
Joe Bim pinches out the end of his cigarette, field-strips the paper, and watches the tobacco blow away in the wind. “Got a call two days ago from Sand Point. The one with the red beard killed the other two, and an Indian woman for good measure. The three of them was drunk and fighting over the woman.”
“I’m not interested.”
“The killing got done with an 1894-model Winchester. Guess who it’s registered to? How’d they end up with your rifle, Albert?”
“Maybe they found it somewhere.”
“I think they stole it out of your house and you didn’t know about it. That’s why you didn’t report it stolen.” Joe Bim folds his hands and gazes at the hillside across the road and the wildflowers ruffling in the wind.
“They killed an innocent person with it?” Albert asks.
“If she was hanging with that bunch, she bought her own ticket. Show some humility for a change. You didn’t invent original sin.”
Albert starts to tell Joe Bim all of it—the attempt he made on the biker’s life, the deed the sheriff’s deputy had done to him when he was eighteen, the accidental death of his father, the incipient rage that has lived in his breast all his adult life—but the words break apart in his throat before he can speak them. In the silence he can hear the wind coursing through the trees and grass, just like the sound of rushing water, and he wonders if it is blowing through the canyon where he lives or through his own soul. He wonders if his reticence with Joe Bim is not indeed the moment of absolution that has always eluded him. He waits for Joe Bim to speak again but realizes his friend’s crooked smile is one of puzzlement, not omniscience, that the puckered skin on the side of his face is a reminder that the good people of the world each carry their own burden.
Albert feeds his dog and says a prayer for his wife. Then he drives down the dirt road with Joe Bim in a sunset that makes him think of gold pollen floating above the fields.
Jesus Out to Sea: Stories Page 12
